In 1975, as Gough Whitlam’s government hurtled towards its demise, a nineteen-year-old arts student at the University of Melbourne, Kim Carr, began a long march.
Raised in an avowedly blue-collar household headed by his boilermaker father, Carr eschewed what he regarded as the fripperies of student politics and went directly for the real thing. He joined his local Labor Party branch, signing up as an active soldier in the labour movement.
Forty-nine years later, Kim Carr is still part of the Labor army. He served in the Senate for twenty-nine years, and was a minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments, a secretary of the Socialist Left faction and a national convenor of the Left.
A Long March
tells a rich and engaging story about a long life in Labor – the often fraught processes of the formulation and development of policy, the maintenance and manoeuvrings of factions, the personal enmities and conflicting ambitions, and the raw use of power inside party forums, political offices, unions, the caucus, the front bench and the bureaucracy. It also looks forward, addressing a key question: how should Labor argue the case for a workable, appealing, durable version of social democracy for twenty-first-century Australia?
As well as a revealing memoir, this is a comprehensive analysis of today’s political landscape told through the life of one of the ALP’s longest-serving members.